Speaking is silver, writing is golden? The role of cognitive and social factors in written versus spoken witness accounts

Abstract

Contradictory empirical findings and theoretical accounts exist that are in favor of either a written or a spoken superiority effect. In this article, we present two experiments that put the recall modality effect in the context of eyewitness reports to another test. More specifically, we investigated the role of cognitive and social factors in the effect. In both experiments, participants watched a videotaped staged crime and then gave spoken or written accounts of the event and the people involved. In Experiment 1, 135 participants were assigned to written, spoken-videotaped, spoken-distracted, or spoken-voice recorded conditions to test for the impact of cognitive demand and social factors in the form of interviewer presence. Experiment 2 (N = 124) tested the idea that instruction comprehensiveness differentially impacts recall performance in written versus spoken accounts. While there was no evidence for a spoken superiority effect, we found some support for a written superiority effect for description quantity, but not accuracy. Furthermore, any differences found in description quantity as a function of recall modality could be traced back to participants' free reports. Following up with cued open-ended questions compensated for this effect, although at the expense of description accuracy. This suggests that current police practice of arbitrarily obtaining written or spoken accounts is mostly unproblematic.

When discussion between eyewitnesses helps memory

“…That may, however, have been due to the fact that collaborative groups had to (1) write down their responses and (2) agree on a response before writing it down. Even when working alone, witnesses tend to report less when they have to write rather than speak (Bekerian & Dennett, 1990;Sauerland & Sporer, 2011; but see Sauerland, Krix, Kan, Glunz, & Sak, 2014). When witnesses have to agree on a response with two others, one might expect that even less information ends up in the written report.…”

Eyewitness Evidence Obtained with the Self‐Administered Interview© Is Unaffected by Stress

“…The statement "The female (1) thief (2) who wore a black (3) shirt (4) took (5) the cell phone (6)." would yield six details (see Sauerland, Krix, van Kan, Glunz, & Sak, 2014, for a similar approach). Subjective responses (e.g., "He was ugly") were not scored.…”

“…As to the perpetrator and verifiable event details, details were considered correct or false if they did or did not match the appearance of the confederate or the script. Confabulations were SAI RECALL PERFORMANCE UNDER STRESS 12 coded separately and were both incorrect and non-existent (e.g., a hat when no headgear was worn; see Sauerland et al, 2014). As in previous research (Krix et al, 2014;Maras, Mulcahy, Memon, Picariello, & Bowler, 2014), information from the sketch in the SAI was also coded, namely objects and their positions.…”

Intoxicated eyewitnesses: The effect of a fully balanced placebo design on event memory and metacognitive control

“…The free recall was completed in writing to minimise interviewer bias. Recent research suggests that written memory accounts of mock crimes are not inferior to spoken accounts and that both writing and speaking are appropriate methods to elicit complete and accurate reports (Sauerland, Krix, van Kan, Glunz, & Sak, ).…”